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Over and over, readers leave comments here saying things like “Nice comment, Brent” on a post that Kendra wrote. We laugh about it – after all, they can’t really be reading that closely if they don’t even notice the name on the bottom of the post, right above where they’re commenting – but we started to ask ourselves questions. Are our writing styles really so similar that people can’t tell us apart despite hand-drawn illustrations, references to our favorite music, and our individual topic selections?

One lucky winner gets this prize. Hand model not included.

So we figured it’s time for a test. We’ve picked 3 topics, and Brent, Jeremiah, and Kendra each wrote a paragraph on each topic.

Your Mission: Guess the author of each paragraph.

Topic 1: Working with Bad Managers

Mystery Author A: In the real world, we don’t skip to work humming Don’t Worry Be Happy while eating a bacon-covered donut. Sometimes we drag our feet on every step of the way, cringing as we walk in the front door of the office. Looking back through my career, the one thing that’s always made me hate my job hasn’t been the work itself – it’s been a bad manager. I’ve been happy doing some truly awful work, but if I’ve got a bad manager, it doesn’t matter how good the work is, because I’ll still hate it. Working with bad managers means working against my own happiness, and I’ve come to learn that there’s no changing bad managers. I can try to manage them and groom them, but doing so comes at the expense of my own happiness and productivity. Life’s too short – take that effort and focus it toward getting a better environment where you can happily contribute and grow.

Mystery Author B: Let’s face it, we’ve all had bad managers. While you should never make your manager look bad, you should help them get better. Mentor your manager just like you would mentor a junior DBA. Provide them with guidance about interacting with the rest of the team – who responds well to which leadership styles – as well as help your bad manager understand how to communicate with the rest of the organization. Above all else, clearly set expectations around your role on the team and, your communication style, and just where your help is going to end. Making sure everyone knows what to expect is a good way to make the best of a bad manager.

Mystery Author C: Bad managers come in so many varieties. Ever worked for The Big Talker who sets out a bold plan, then folds at the first complaint from customers? How about The Groundhog who never remembers anything from the day before– so you get to constantly re-explain what you do? Have you reported to The Gossip, who can’t keep anyone’s secrets, much less their own? The trick to working for all bad managers is to remember that they aren’t your parent. Take charge of your career. Track your goals and weekly progress. Proactively schedule and manage meetings. Direct your own work. Make connections with your customers. People around you will notice who on your team is effective and helpful, and the skill of managing yourself successfully is well worth having in the long run.

Topic 2: Working with Remote Teams

Mystery Author A: Working remotely can be tricky; there can be a significant lag in communications and people in different time zones may have different expectations about when you leave work. Like almost anything else the key is to make sure that everyone on the team has an understanding of how and when communication will occur. If you pick up the phone at 8:00PM, then you can rest assured that your co-workers will assume you’ll be working until 8:00PM. It’s just as important to stay in communication with your remote team via email and some tool like Skype or Microsoft Communicator. It’s just as important to communicate at the right time as it is to communicate face to face.

Mystery Author B: You might not trust the guy sitting in the next cubicle over, but if you haven’t worked with successful telecommuters, you probably trust a remote worker even less. The key to remote team success is verifiable trust: feeling confident that invisible team members are doing the right amount of the right thing at the right time. Both words are important – verifiable and trust. When I’m working away from the rest of the team, I stay visible on instant messaging tools and try to respond as quickly as possible even when I’m away from the computer. A phone with email and good apps is your best friend. When a member of the remote team drops offline for extended periods, not visible in chat and not responding to emails, trust erodes and it’s time to start doing some verification. Are they checking in good code at frequent intervals? Are they responding to tickets and requests from other team members? If not, the thrill is gone.

Mystery Author C: I’ve learned one thing from years of experience working with remote teams: email can be your worst enemy. What seems clear, precise, and specific in one time zone comes across as vague, soupy, and just plain weird in another. It usually takes days to find a critical misunderstanding about instructions sent in an email, then more time to clarify the issue. Meeting regularly with webcams– at least twice per month– may require working some strange hours, but it will save your projects hundreds of hours in the long run. Schedule the meetings in advance and make sure it’s OK to use flex time to avoid burnout.

Topic 3: Working with Your Nemesis

Mystery Author A: Sooner or later, we all work with that one special person who pushes every button. You may feel that your nemesis is unethical or has harmed your career. How do you handle it? The most important technique is the most difficult: don’t gossip about the issue. Ever. If you have knowledge of specific unethical behavior, you need to report it. That’s where discussion should end. As soon as you blow off steam at work by talking about your colleague, you complicate the situation and make it more difficult to resolve. Instead, focus on what’s best for the company. When things feel too personal, block off some time in your calendar and use it to take a walk or work on your own goals in a place where you can’t be interrupted. Every job is temporary, but your reputation stays with you.

Mystery Author B: I’ve worked with a few people that I just couldn’t stand. Part of me always wanted to be a jerk, but another part of me wants to be respected and to get my job done. When working with your nemesis, it’s important to minimize unhealthy conflict. Conflict itself is good; healthy conflict will lead to challenging your existing ideas and making you better as a professional. Unhealthy conflict is going to lead to leaving three week old tuna fish sandwiches in someone’s desk drawer. I survived working with a nemesis by cultivating healthy conflict. We challenged each other on our ideas; even when we were on different projects, I always worked to make sure we were pushing each other forward instead of down the stairs. It wasn’t always a good time, but I got better as a result.

Mystery Author C: Oh no, it’s that guy. Try to avoid eye contact. We’ll slink into the stairway rather than use the elevator – he’s too lazy to take the stairs, so we can avoid having to spend another lunch hour with him. Whew! Made it. How the heck does he keep his job here? They say he produces good results, but I don’t believe that for a second. He must have incriminating pictures of somebody, because I’d have fired him long ago. You know what? I’ve had enough. Let’s make a plan to get rid of that stupid, arrogant jerkwad. We’ll take him out for drinks tonight and – no, wait, put the knife down, bear with me for a second. When he’s plastered, we’ll steal his phone and take pictures of our junk and text it to Shiela in HR. She’ll think it’s his junk – well, I mean, as long as she’s never actually seen his junk, but you know what a prude Shiela is, so that can’t be possible. He’ll get fired, and then hopefully the next guy will be better. I swear, I can’t understand why this company can’t just hire nice, normal people? Nobody ever sticks around here other than you and me. Raise your glass – let’s have a toast to dedicated, friendly, hard-working people like us. Cheers! Hey, waiter, bring us another round of martinis.

Test Time! Who Wrote What?

Copy/paste the below into your comment and give us your best guess in the comments before Sunday, March 4th at midnight GMT. We’ll throw all the correct answers in a hat, draw one winner at random, and announce their name on our March 6th webcast, How to Get Your First Job as a Database Administrator. If no one guesses the answers correctly, we’ll throw all of the most correct answers in a hat (meaning, if four people guessed 7 names correctly, those four people will go in the hat.) The winner will receive a set of PASS Summit 2011 Spotlight, Half-Day and Regular Session Recordings DVDs.

The fine print: Contest limited to US and Canada residents, because international shipping is such a pain in the old blog post. If you’re abroad, you can still enter for the fame and bragging rights, but you won’t get the prize – we’ll designate an honorary US/Canada winner on your behalf.

Honestly, we didn’t try to muddy it at all, but we did have to steer clear of the visual tools we usually use to bring personality to our posts, like clip art and drawings. Reading the posts myself, it was really tough to pick the author and I know my own coworkers!

We wrote them all blind. Nobody saw anyone else’s writing until all of their own was complete, and we each just tried to write the best paragraphs we could on each topic. We decided it was most fair to leave Lady Gaga and the drawings of unicorns out of it completely, just so that didn’t seem like an obvious giveaway (or a dastardly trap!).

To be fair, I used a text editor with Intellisense built in. I then drank four pots of coffee and rolled my face across the keyboard for 5 minutes. It’s a William Burroughs-esque approach to writing (minus serious quantities of hallucinogens), but I think it works for me.